


The Animal Is In (Please Hold While We Connect Her)

by TheVeryLastValkyrie



Series: The Institute of Life and Death [2]
Category: The Musketeers (2014)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Spies & Secret Agents, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-12
Updated: 2015-07-12
Packaged: 2018-04-08 23:41:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 575
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4325334
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheVeryLastValkyrie/pseuds/TheVeryLastValkyrie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Queenie has no name and no future. Aramis has the glasses she needs to read the newspaper. Love is a many-splendoured thing. References to sadomasochism, torture, previous rape and self-harm, but still rather cheerful for all that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Animal Is In (Please Hold While We Connect Her)

“Oh God, I am so –”

“You don’t have to be sorry.”

She can’t help it: Queenie, the minor league royal victim girl with no name, has stopped roaring but can’t seem to stop biting and kicking. Aramis has three deep scratches down one side of his face, and Milady says it would be better for all concerned to just restrain her again. He doesn’t agree; they’ve finally managed to get his black-framed glasses onto her nose, and now she can read the newspaper clenched between her trembling knees. They’ll figure out her prescription, and her clothes size, and her appropriate adult when she stops taking chunks out of people.

“But I _am_ sorry.” Her eyes are almost violet, and the shadows circling them are lilac. Her bruises are mauve. Her lips are lavender. Regal as hell, she is. “Every time you touch me – every time any of you touch me – I want to die. I want to die anyway, but –” Her lips twist. Her mouth looks like a peeled plum. “Not very sociable of me, is it.”

He played her music until she remembered how to stand up, until she was bold enough to creep out of her padded cell when they opened the door. There’s so much rage inside, rage the institute wants to stake its claim on before anyone else can. Whoever she was, Queenie is a ghost now, as competent a killer by complete accident as Aramis ever was by training. He’s French Foreign Legion, Anonymous, Five and Six. She’s a common-or-garden mass-murderer, but now nobody remembers the night of endless screaming but her.

She still likes the colours he makes in the air when she squints, but she got too excited and burnt the feeling right out of both feet with a blowtorch way back when she was crazy. She’s sane enough to mourn that now.

“Do you want to try again?” His lower lip is puffy. Somewhere, somebody else is yelling, and Constance is playing honky-tonk to drown out the sound.

“Second toe,” she suggests. “Left foot.”

So without acknowledging the fact she’s still recovering from her fourth suicide attempt, Aramis flips a black cherry hard candy to the other side of his mouth and reaches out one bitten hand. He grasps the charred toe without flinching and, because she doesn’t feel it, Queenie doesn’t flinch either. She does smile, a real smile which makes the hair floating around her bloodless face look like a halo.

“There has to be something,” he says, in a low, strained voice. “Worth living for.”

Her love for him, who brought her back from the dead: but it’s in her now, death, and it’s going to come out somewhere – maybe.

“Maybe.”

And because she can’t move, and can’t cut, and can’t wrap her hands around her throat to get some form of traction, some form of release, he lets her bite him all over. He props his chin on top of the fragile skull, and she sinks her teeth into him again and again, sighing when he tenses. She stamps him with neat, irregular circles, sucks comfortably on the edge of his shirt once sated, when the world is quiet again. The memories of being a real girl are strange, cramped, ugly beasts, and they push against the inside of her head otherwise. _Dirty girl_. _Dirty birdie_.

But his adoration is a strange, cramped, ugly beast.

It means he wants to lick her clean.


End file.
